26.09.16
Nuffield Trust: New figures show NHS ‘is still affordable’
It is still financially possible to pay for the NHS, the Nuffield Trust has said in response to new figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
The figures estimate projected healthcare spending in response to factors such as economic productivity, morbidity and other cost pressures.
The UK currently spends 7.4% of its GDP on healthcare, which is set to fall to 6.9% by 2020 under the current government funding settlement. However, the OBR figures show that this amount could increase to 8.8% by 2030, a real-terms increase of £100bn.
Professor John Appleby, chief executive at the Nuffield Trust, said: “The increase in projected spending does not seem out of line with history – and indeed, is slightly lower than the long-term growth in spending.”
He pointed out that since 1953, spending on healthcare has increased by a real-terms average of 4% a year, whereas an increase to 8.8% by 2030 would represent a growth of less than 0.1% a year.
In total, the proposed increase in spending over 15 years would be the same as the growth over just five years from 1999-2000 to 2004-05.
If healthcare spending increased to 8.8% by 2030, it would take the UK to the levels of health spending in France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Japan in 2015.
Professor Appleby added: “The real debate the UK needs to have is over how much more we want to spend on the NHS, not whether we need to change the way the health service is funded.”
In a recent report, the Royal College of Physicians warned that the NHS is “unsustainable” without a new budget.
Last week, NHS England published its first two-year operational planning guidance, designed to help trusts meet the unprecedented financial pressures needed to deliver £22bn of NHS savings by 2020.
A Department of Health spokesperson said: “As the Nuffield Trust analysis makes clear, the way the NHS is currently funded continues to be sustainable and the public can be assured that under this government the NHS will remain free at the point of use.”
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